Matador bring an Italian maestro on board

Today counts in Cagliari. After a few days of practice and yesterday's warm up race, it is down to the serious business of earning Audi MedCup Circuit points, and winning regattas. Around the Audi MedCup Circuit village it has felt like a slow burn start to the day, with just a gentle breeze. But it is already hot and the predictions are that the reliable sea-breeze will arrive on cue. What has been interesting so far here is that thermally assisted wind has continued into the early evening, and so there should be a good chance that the Audi Region of Sardinia Regatta can start with a three race day.

Matador's navigator Steve Hayles (GBR) is expecting the sea breeze to be a little lighter today and the course possibly to be a little less one-sided than the past couple of practice days on the Gulf of Cagliari:

"It is just the way the gradient (wind) is set up today. Maybe the race course has been a little bit one sided, we had a sort of unofficial practice day and the official practice day yesterday and it was a little bit one sided and so I don’t think that will be the case as much today." he suggests, before reporting on the hard job that the shore team have completed to get the 2007 Rolf Vrolijk design back into top racing shape:

"The boat is back together and that is thanks to the guys who really did have to work extremely hard to get it finished, I am obviously removed from that side of it a little bit, but I know that the boat captain and his team have been absolutely flat out to get ready and they have done a good job because the boat is back to full strength, and I don’t think it is any heavier or affected in any way, really."

Two changes have been made to key positions on Matador, for this regatta only, and were always planned as a result of a conflict with another major regatta in the USA.

" The crew changes were pretty much planned, both Vince (Brun, tactician, USA)) and ‘Stir Fry’ (Simon Fry, trimmer, GBR) have been racing at the Etchells worlds in Chicago and so it was always going to be just a little bit too tight for them to get here for practice day, and so we have Alby (Pratt, trimmer, AUS) and Francesco Bruni (ITA) has stepped in for Vince, which is good because he knows the waters here quite well and obviously . Just for this regatta."

Changing key crew and adding a new language to the decision making process cannot be easy:

" You do have to go through some processes in learning the best communication. From a particularly selfish point of view it is always very interesting to sail with different people. When we decided it was going to be hard to Vince to be here, then Francesco was a great choice. He has literally just stepped straight off his Melges 32 yesterday and on to our boat. He knows the place pretty well anyway."

" We have a real mix of languages on board which is never easy . Most people fortunately speak English and so mostly it is conducted in English, and they are good, the grasp the subtleties and are very technical and I am extremely grateful for that, but Guillermo Parada (ARG) who runs the boat is very fluent in English and is good in Italian too. Sometimes the front of the boat runs itself in Argentinean, and in moments of high stress people default to their native language, but to be honest it is never a problem."

Matador still matches up favourably as one of the top boats in the fleet, Hayles, believes.

" There is an edge with the new boats, but it is very small and hard to define, it is not in measurable speed or whatever, I think you have to remember with the new boats that they were not at 100% at the first regatta, like any programme, so the old boats are at their peak and this boat has had new mods, a new rudder, a new rig, but the incremental changes you can make to the new boat are small, and the new boats are on a rapidly accelerating learning curve."


" My input is just as much we can do in terms of trying to record data and provide the right information to people. It really is, in simple terms about recording. The instrumentation aboard is obviously pretty top end, we record all that at least once a second, all day, every day. And so initially you are just trying to store information and have access to it, then you set about analyzing it. In these (TP52) programmes it is usually comes as a request from somebody, a trimmer or the driver will come to me and say, ‘what happened? Are well sailing faster or slower than our targets, are we using too much rudder, is the rake measurement right, what is the trend. And so then we effectively plough into that database of information and find what the trend is. It is relatively simple, I mean we don’t have people sat in a back room analyzing it, as it would be in the Cup world. But it is an important part and most teams will have performance de-briefs and then also the feedback to the designers, you try and get information back to the them and maybe they can comment on whatever they can. The problem, of course, with sailing, is that you can record maybe 100 channels of information but in reality there are probably 1000 different channels. But it is pretty simple."